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Why did it take me so long?

I should have done this 15 years ago.  I was working with the treasurer this week, putting together one of those seemingly endless string of reports we have to make to various levels of government.  It took us about two hours.  Later that evening, I got thinking about it.  I’ve been doing this report as long as I’ve worked in this job.  And every year it is the same thing.  We ask ourselves the same questions.  We have to add up the same amounts from the same GL Accounts.  And every year, it takes us two or three hours of tedious slugging to get it done.

This is the last year, though.  I had a bit of a brainwave.  I had taken a MuniSoft webinar recently where they taught us how to create our own custom reports from information in our General Ledger.  I enjoyed the course.  And even tried creating a few of my own reports, just for fun.  It worked great but you know how these things go.  I got caught up in other things and just never got back to creating any more.

So, when it finally occurred to me that this might be a perfect opportunity to put that training to use, I was pretty excited.  I was soon back into the Custom Reports doing up a report that provided the exact information we needed for that annual submission.  MuniSoft’s report writer is pretty straightforward.  I only had a couple of times where I needed to fix up things that weren’t quite right.  And it was actually kind of fun.

And the interesting thing is that it took me about the same amount of time to create the custom report as the time I spend with the treasurer each year doing the calculations manually!  And now that I have created the custom report, next year (and every year after!) I’ll be able to provide the information with a push of a button.

So what did the treasurer think when I told her about the time we would be saving each year from now on?  Well, here’s an exact quote:  “Awesome!  Totally exciting….you rock!”  Great for the ego.  I didn’t say this to the treasurer but the one thing I did ask myself was – why didn’t I do this years ago!